I remember the seventh grade, 1968, the last year of Bible reading and prayer in our school. Our homeroom teacher, a part-time minister, always opened the morning with a verse and prayer. It was a time of lost innocence, as puberty and hormones were in full overdrive, and would continue for some time to come.
But, it was more than that, it was a time of both personal and national confusion. It seemed everything started to lose its way; Our home life, our school, our community, and very much, our nation. In the years following, it didn't get better, only worse. Over the next several years, a host of calamities rocked my own little world, and my nation at large: The continuing Viet Nam "police action" (and our disillusionment with it), Kent State (our National Guard firing upon university students), a national economic crisis (gas embargo, groceries and interest rates skyrocketing), Israel attacked, escalating another war and Middle East tensions, and in my own school, racial riots destroyed an institution and a community. Was there any correlation between our spiritual disconnect from Almighty God and the chaos afterwards? In retrospect, it seems altogether a certainty.
Yet, we strived for peace; a pull-out in Viet Nam, the Camp David Peace Accord, a petro deal with OPEC, and things looked like they might get better, or at least, subside. But then, Congress had a budget crisis, and paralyzed our government for three months, an arms embargo with Turkey heightened more tensions, and most direly, Iran seized our Embassy, and took hundreds of hostages. Confusion, calamity and chaos ruled again. Even in this time of grave darkness, God in His infinite mercy, gave us a man of faith and hope, Ronald Reagan. Yet, we didn't heed the spiritual warnings, but used RR for our own prosperity and gain. Although pockets of revival broke out, and the Christian right was born, our nation still wanted to seek its own way; materialism, atheism, abortion rights, living off credit, greater government spending, socialization, and intrusion were what the masses AND the power brokers wanted. And we pursued that end even to this day.
Yet the warnings still came; our ships and more embassies attacked by Muslim radicals, violent hurricanes pounded the Southeast, fires in California, droughts in the West & Mid-West, floods in the Ohio valley region, record snows and blizzards in the Northeast, invasion of Kuwait and a short "war", and then, the first bomb attempt on the World Trade Center. Our leaders believed peace through negotiation, appeasement and consolation would set it all aright... But the worst was yet to come, and we hold our breath even now.
Sept. 11, 2001 shocked us to the core. Wall St. was already reeling from the tech and dot.com bust in April. And we went to war, first in Iraq, then Afghanistan...and we're still there. Two years ago, the mortgage and real estate markets collapsed, and are still treading water. The commercial real estate, bond & Treasury markets are waiting in the wings to implode. Rampant government spending and ensuing inflation are already in the works. We're in the worst financial, economic, social, educational, government AND Spiritual crisis in our history, and yet, we still don't remember...the God of our fathers.
____________________NEWS______________________
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